LIFE=JOY.

November 3, 2007

OpenSocial by the campfire.

Google and friends (all 200 Million now represented) introduce how open social API will work in developer-speak 😉 I still get the nagging feeling that this is less than 1/3 of the final solution. Sure, we’ve nailed [1] “excited market/ROI potential” and maybe a bit of “distribution” and something open (not proprietary) but what about [2] privacy as my range of once-separate social networks could now be joined up and what about the inter-related issues of identity, reputation and trust and so forth? Then, what about [3] the broader creative user experience that will ensue once all this very different sociological data is being displayed to a global audience all in one place? So, the developers have broken out first; UX-ers where are you?

The next big questions are:

If the millions of googlists are already working “at fever pitch” should Microsoft be doing something to the front-end of MOSS?

Is the web as a collection of “sites” or containers on its death bed? Will we all just collect data from around the web, connect and view it in our own shared comfort “zone” on whatever device we prefer?

So my position is “open social networking” big whoop! What’s next? How do we actually ensure this is not just a huge snowball of “X” rolling down the hill towards the web-using community? How do we find the sociological answer to the underlying sociological problems outlined above and then re-introduce that back into the current furore of unbridled development exuberance?